Why are home robots so dumb?

 While the competition is quite ferocious with many competitors from China, the market was really established few years ago by iRobot Roomba. At the time, the "simple" vacuum robot was able to follow a pre-defined pattern and managing basic exceptions. 

fast forward to today, robot are everywhere, car have the ability to selfdrive, autonomous devices are populating factories and robot are smarter than event. Smarter? Except in the house. 

The average intelligence of home robots is still very basic. 

Even the specialized device, dedicated to a single task such as vacuum, are struggling keeping doing the basics. 

Numerous of video are highlighting the stupidest moment of our vacuum pets. from the bath in the swimming pool to the spread of feces around the house, youtube got enriched with valuable content. But those event could be considered as exception and would not be necessary the first capabilities defining the robot intelligence.

The common behaviors are those helping to mesure the ability to perform the main duty. and this is where it fails. We are still seeing bad level of mapping quality. terrible behavior with robot dancing without obvious reason instead of executing its duty. This gap between the era of ChatGPT, Tesla almost autonomous driving and Roomba is becoming too big.

Lets ask a robot why its cousins are not brighter. ChatGPT provides good pointers:

One reason not highlighted by chatgpt is the market expectation. For years, people were applauding the dance of those robot pet. Not a lot of expectations. With the robot being more normalized in our daily life the market has moved as well and now getting some tangible expectations. Results are being oversighted. 

Market interest disconnect with manufacturers focus points

The performance of the first 20 minutes are not really relevant since robot are supposed to work while humain are away. Home user are looking at final results after hours of work and unfortunately dont see drastic evolution between the dumb robot of 2005 and the smarter cousin of 2023. 

think encore.